Meta

Month: June 2006

Nui TeKoha has posted up a classic telephone interview with George Clinton up on Nui’s Rave. For you kids out there who don’t know who George is, you would absolutely recognise "bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay" from his classic track Atomic Dog which has been sampled a million times, including Snoop Dogg’s song "What’s My Name?". George’s music has been central to the G-Funk sound. As George says on the interview "Atomic Dog was the beginning of hip-hop." He encourages rappers to sample his music. He gets the benefits of having top hip-hop tracks references his music. Listen to the show here.Â

Join Cameron Reilly, Australia’s #1 podcaster, and his special guest co-hosts Mike Seyfang and Rod Adams, as they try to figure out whether or not Australia should go down the nuclear energy path and whether or not Google Checkout and Google Wallet are good or evil!

Don’t forget to pop over to our G’DAY WORLD FORUM to chat about all this stuff in more detail.
And participate in the conversation by leaving us a message!!!

Steve Coulson, the guy behind Podguide.TV, one of the leading directories for video podcasts, sent out an email today announcing he is stopping work on it. From his blog post:

This was a hard decision to make, and I want to thank everyone who supported me over the months. I started writing reviews soon after the video iPod became available last year, and have devoted 15-20 hrs a week of my life to it since then. But it became increasingly clear that the effort involved was not going to bring the rewards, either personally or financially, to make it preferable to spending that extra 2 hrs a day with my family. Despite my best efforts, traffic has stayed flat, potential investors have pulled me in multiple directions but leaving me with only thousands of dollars in legal fees, and it just became too much to carry on with alone.

I can feel his pain. Having spent the last 16 months of my life (and hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money) building TPN, wondering if it will end up as a real business or a footnote in Wikipedia, the life of a start-up entrepreneur is dicey. Being ahead of the curve is very exciting, very liberating as you find your literally inventing an industry with a handful of other people from around the globe… but it’s also extremely risky and takes an enormous toll on your life, your bank account and your family. I’d like to congratulate Steve on all he has achieved and wish him the best in the future. I’m sure his experience puttingÂ Podguide.TV together will stand him in good stead in the employment markets. I wish I was in a situation to help him out. If any of you work for a company who should be getting their head around video podcasts, Steve would be a great resource to pick up in a hurry.

I have no idea why I find these ASCII versions of people so hilarious – but I do. Erin McNaught is Australia’s entry into the Miss Universe competition this year and I suspect this ASCII picture was the part of her portfolio that won her the gig. Okay, so she looks okay in flesh-mode as well. I saw her on TV today (thank god it isn’t the 4th of July yet) talking about how she did some partial nude shots (oh my god say it isn’t true! women come in nude flavour?) for her modelling portfolio a couple of years ago and some folks think she shouldn’t be allowed to represent her country in Miss Universe as a result. Mind you, Australia’s Miss Universe winners do have a history of wardrobe malfunctions, don’t they?

If you’re like me, you are increasingly worrying about what we, humans, are doing to the environment and wondering what things you can do to make a difference without necessarily becoming a tree-hugger. This is the show for you. Us. Treading Lightly. Kevin and Jason are two Aussies who are passionate about improving the way they interact with their environment and have tips and tricks for the rest of us.

Podcasting APB is a new show on TPN, hosted by me, that will focus exclusively on the state of the podcasting industry. We’ll be interviewing top podcasters from around the globe, discovering their motivation and secrets, and keeping you up to date on the news in the industry. I hope you’ll tune in!

HERE is an idea for a pilot for a new reality television show: it’s about a small coterie of powerful men who grew very rich because they held the only licences to the four television networks that became far and away Australia’s most popular mass medium.

Worth a read. Interesting that we’re starting to see more of these stories hit the MSM.

Looks like this news is a couple of weeks old, but I just found out about it, so perhaps you missed it as well. Via Shazbot:

CompanionLink for Google Calendarâ„¢ is a two-way synchronization solution for people that want to extend their Google Calendar onto their desktop calendar systems or mobile devices. It can synchronize Google Calendar with all the latest Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry devices in addition to Outlook, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, and Groupwise applications.

Well that’s half of the ideal solution for Pocket PC users like myself who no longer want to use Outlook but still want to use a Pocket PC. Ideally I’d like a Pocket PC application which can run offline but synch with Google Calendar once I dock it (or via the web, but at the rates mobileco’s in Australia charge for mobile internet…).

I’ve installed the 14-day trial of CompanionLink but I’m having trouble getting it to connect to Google Calendar. It keeps telling me my email address or password is wrong, and I’m pretty sure it isn’t. So I’ll keep trying. If anyone else gives this a try, please pop over to the Productivity forum and let me know what you think of the product.

For those of you living in Australia, TPN gets a small but worthy mention in an article of page 16 of the Weekend Australian Financial Review today in a story about radio networks and their podcasting strategies. I’d like to thank Mark Jones, the IT Editor of the Fin for making sure we got a mention.